Human-Tech

Ethical and Scientific Foundations

Kim Vicente and Edited by Alex Kirlik

This book collects in one convenient source the technical material providing the HTI research foundations underlying Kim Vicente's Human-tech approach as presented in his popular, general audience book The Human Factor.

The technical articles represent a set of object lessons for how to select and use HTI research methods in a truly problem- driven and use-inspired way, rather than allowing research to become shaped by the methods most conveniently at hand.

The commentaries situate the technical articles in the context of broader, contemporary developments and discussions now occurring in related areas of scientific research relevant to HTI.

The addition of a sixth, ethical level to Vicente's five-level Human-tech approach provides additional rationale, meaning, and authority to the mandate to conduct HTI research from a perspective that starts with human and societal needs rather technological opportunities.

While professional ethics has always been an important aspect of engineering education and practice, the book identifies and describes a newly emerging and more profound way in which ethics is becoming increasingly central to engineering, as technology is increasingly creating and constraining opportunities for the expression human dignity and free will.

The call and response format of the book that emerges through the interlaced interplay between the author and editor, both authorities in the HTI discipline, animates and makes concrete the discussion of often complex ideas in a way sure to keep the reader's attention.

Human-Tech

Ethical and Scientific Foundations

Kim Vicente and Edited by Alex Kirlik

Description

In The Human Factor, Kim Vicente coined the term 'Human-tech' to describe a more encompassing and ambitious approach to the study of Human-Technology Interaction (HTI) than is now evident in any of its participating disciplines, such as human factors, human-computer interaction, cognitive science and engineering, industrial design, informatics or applied psychology. Observing that the way forward is 'not by widgets alone,' Vicente's Human-tech approach addresses every level—physical, psychological, team, organizational, and political—at which technology impacts quality of life, identifies a human or societal need, and then tailors technology to what we know about human nature at that level. The Human Factor was written for a broad audience, in part to educate general readers beyond the HTI community about the need to think seriously about the tremendous impact that poorly designed technology can have, ranging from user frustration to the tragic loss of human life. The articles collected in this book provide much of the technical material behind the work that was presented in The Human Factor, and the commentaries by Alex Kirlik situate these articles in their broader historical, scientific and ethical context. This collection of articles and commentaries forms a set of recommendations for how HTI research ought to broaden both its perspective and its practical, even ethical, aspirations to meet the increasingly complicated challenges of designing technology to support human work, to improve quality of life, and to design the way will live with technology. As the first book both to integrate the theory and research underlying Human-tech, and to clearly delineate the scientific challenges and ethical responsibilities that await those who either design technology for human use, or design technology that influences or even structures the working or daily lives of others, Human-tech: Ethical and Scientific Foundations will appeal to the broad range of students and scholars in all of the HTI disciplines.